# Why English is the language of science: history and data

**Why is English the language of science, and when did it replace Latin, German and French?** English is the language of science because of twentieth-century events, not an old tradition. Latin gave way to national languages from the 1600s, and around 1900 English, French and German shared medicine roughly equally. The 1919 boycott of German science, two world wars and American post-war research followed, and by 2015 about 97% of papers in Web of Science's science index were English.

Published 2026-10-03 by EdCitation. https://edcitation.com/newsletter/how-english-became-the-language-of-science

English became the language of science in the twentieth century, and the publication data show how recent the change is. In 1879, English-language journals made up 35% of those in the Index Medicus, Medline's printed forerunner, and German ones 25% (Baethge, 2008). By 2007, 88.6% of Medline's 5,204 journals were in English and 1.9% in German.

EdCitation publishes this guide. We read every study, funder's rule and court record cited here on 2 and 3 October 2026, and each figure comes from the paper that reports it; where we read only an abstract, we say so.

Two steps are free on EdCitation with no account: the Language filter in [Find sources](https://edcitation.com/) reaches research in twelve languages, and [Cite a source](https://edcitation.com/cite) builds each reference from the publisher's record. EdCitation never writes any part of anyone's work, a line we hold with pride: the reading and the writing stay yours.

## Why is English the language of science?

English is the language of science because a run of twentieth-century events (war, a boycott, emigration and the post-war weight of American research) turned a three-language system into a one-language one. Hamel (2007) puts the result in his abstract: more than 75% of articles in international periodicals in the social sciences and humanities, and well over 90% in the natural sciences, are in English.

### A lingua franca by degrees

Liu (2017), counting Web of Science's three citation indexes, found German and French still important in the sciences and social sciences in the first half of the twentieth century and again in the 1970s and 1980s. In the last decade of data, to 2015, about 97% of papers in the science index, 95% in the social sciences index and 73% in the arts and humanities index were in English. We read Liu's abstract; the full text sat behind a check for robots.

## When was Latin the language of science?

Latin was the shared language of European learning into the seventeenth century. The historian Michael Gordin, interviewed by the NEH's magazine *Humanities*, dates the turn to around 1610, when Galileo moved from Latin to Italian, and points to Newton: the *Principia* in Latin in 1687, the *Opticks* in English in 1704. After about 1830, he says, it is "virtually impossible to find" an important scientific work in Latin (Gillis, 2015). Our guide to [the first scientific journals](https://edcitation.com/newsletter/the-first-scientific-journals) follows the same split in print.

### Where Latin held on longest

Botany kept Latin longest. From 1 January 1935, a new plant or fungus name was validly published only with a description or diagnosis in Latin, and algae followed from 1958. In July 2011 the International Botanical Congress in Melbourne voted to accept English or Latin from 1 January 2012 (Knapp et al., 2011). Students still meet Latin in [Latin abbreviations](https://edcitation.com/newsletter/latin-abbreviations-in-academic-writing).

## Was German the language of science?

German was one of the three leading languages of science until the First World War. Baethge (2008) writes that at the start of the twentieth century medicine still used German, English and French "to a roughly equal extent". In 1879 the Index Medicus listed 284 English-language journals out of 810, 201 German and 160 French.

### The 1919 boycott

The war broke that balance. The International Research Council, founded in 1919 by the academies of the major Allied nations, excluded the former Central Powers by statute from itself and its new unions until the clause was repealed in 1926 (Cock, 1983). Reinbothe (2013), in the English abstract of an article in German, adds that the new organisations used only French and English as official languages, and that the boycott began a lasting decline of German in international science.

### German at home and in exile

Gordin adds that roughly half the American states criminalised the use and teaching of German after 1917, laws that fell in *Meyer v. Nebraska*, which he dates 1924; the Court's record dates the decision 4 June 1923 (Meyer v. Nebraska, 1923). Hitler's regime then drove out or murdered German-Jewish scientists (Gillis, 2015). Citation habits followed: in German medical weeklies, references to German-language work fell from 80 to 90% in 1920 to 10 to 20% in 1995, by a count Baethge (2008) reports from an earlier study.

## What happened to the languages of science after 1945?

After 1945 English became the default. Reinbothe (2013) writes that the Western victors rebuilt international science on the structures and language rules of 1919 and 1920, while American scientists worked actively to establish English. The Cold War added Russian: in January 1954 the Georgetown–IBM experiment put selected Russian sentences into English by computer, and in Gordin's account the Soviet reply led the CIA to fund Georgetown's work (Gillis, 2015).

## What do the language of scientific publications statistics show?

The statistics show English rising in every period and index, though each share depends on what was counted. Each row comes from the source named.

| Period | Dominant language(s) | Evidence | Source |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| About 1610 to 1704 | Latin, giving way to Italian and English | Galileo turns to Italian; *Principia* in Latin, *Opticks* in English | Gillis (2015) |
| After about 1830 | National languages | Important works in Latin "virtually impossible to find" | Gillis (2015) |
| 1879 | English, German, French | Index Medicus: 284 English, 201 German, 160 French journals of 810 | Baethge (2008) |
| About 1900 | German, English, French | Medicine uses the three "to a roughly equal extent" | Baethge (2008) |
| 1919 to 1926 | English and French in international bodies | Central Powers excluded from the International Research Council | Cock (1983); Reinbothe (2013) |
| 1935 to 2011 | Latin, in botany | Latin required for new plant names | Knapp et al. (2011) |
| 2007 | English | 88.6% of Medline journals English, 1.9% German, 1.6% French | Baethge (2008) |
| Decade to 2015 | English | About 97% of science papers in Web of Science | Liu (2017) |
| 1990 to 2023 | English; Spanish, Portuguese, Indonesian growing | English 93.86% of Dimensions articles in 1990, 85.51% in 2023; French from second to 1.05% | Pradier et al. (2025) |
| Your own search | Twelve languages | The Language filter in EdCitation's [Find sources](https://edcitation.com/) | Our run, 3 October 2026 |

### Why the figures disagree

They count different things: Baethge journals, Liu papers in an index known to favour English, and Pradier, Céspedes and Larivière articles in Dimensions, whose wider coverage of non-English journals partly explains English's falling share. In their preprint, 98.89% of cited references are to work in English.

An often-repeated number, that 98% of science is published in English, appears in Ramírez-Castañeda (2020) with Gordin's book *Scientific Babel* as its source; we could not read the book, so we cannot confirm how it was reached. How indexes skew towards English is covered in [non-English and regional sources in your paper](https://edcitation.com/newsletter/non-english-and-regional-sources-in-your-paper).

## What does English cost non-native English speakers in science?

Time, money and opportunities, as surveys measure them. Amano et al. (2023) surveyed 908 environmental scientists of eight nationalities, from Bangladeshi to British. Among those with one English-language paper, scientists from countries of moderate English proficiency took a median 46.6% longer than native speakers to read a paper in English, and those from low-proficiency countries 90.8% longer. Preparing a talk in English took the two groups 93.7% and 38.0% longer.

In revision, 42.5% and 42.6% of them were often or always asked to improve their English, against 3.4% of native speakers. About 30% of early-career Japanese and Spanish respondents often or always skipped English-language conferences because of language, and about half often or always avoided giving talks. The study's figures on rejections and writing time are in [translating your paper for an English-language journal](https://edcitation.com/newsletter/translating-your-paper-for-an-english-language-journal).

### A national case: Colombia

Ramírez-Castañeda (2020) surveyed 49 Colombian biologists whose first language is Spanish; 92% of their articles were in English. A paper took an average of 114.57 labour hours to write in Spanish and 211.4 in English, 43.5% reported a rejection or revision for English grammar, and editing or translation cost a quarter to half of a monthly doctoral salary per article. For the writing itself, see [academic writing in a second language](https://edcitation.com/newsletter/academic-writing-in-a-second-language) and [world Englishes in academic writing](https://edcitation.com/newsletter/world-englishes-in-academic-writing).

## Which journals and funders require English?

Most science journals publish only in English, and the large European funders require English or strongly advise it.

### Funders

- **European Research Council:** any official EU language is accepted, but English is "strongly advised". Panels work in English, read other languages through a raw machine translation the agency does not check, and require an English abstract (European Research Council, 2026).
- **Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG):** German or English, with English encouraged where it is the field's common language, to widen the pool of reviewers; the summary must be in both (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, 2023).
- **Swiss National Science Foundation:** the scientific part must be in English in mathematics, the natural and engineering sciences, biology, medicine, psychology, economics and political science (Swiss National Science Foundation, 2016).

### Journals

Arenas-Castro et al. (2024) read the policies of 736 biology journals as of late 2021. Fewer than 7% let authors publish in another language, 18% mentioned a second-language abstract in their guidelines, two said a paper would not be rejected solely for its English, and 58% sent authors to commercial editing services. Since then, they note, *Evolution* has offered authors English mentoring, the British Ecological Society free AI proofreading, and the EcoEvoRxiv preprint server Spanish and Portuguese submissions. Baethge's own journal took a bilingual route: from 2008 its scientific articles also appear in English online, as *Deutsches Ärzteblatt International*.

## How do you find science published in German, French or other languages?

Search in English first, then set the Language filter and search again in that language's own words. In EdCitation's [Find sources](https://edcitation.com/), Language sits in the filter panel with "Any language" as its default and twelve choices, German, French, Russian and Japanese among them.

1. Search in English with no filter, to see the field's main English-language work.
2. Open Language and pick one.
3. Search again in that language's terms (*Wissenschaftssprache*, *langue scientifique*), since many records carry no English title.
4. Open each record and check the language of the text itself.
5. Build the reference with [Cite a source](https://edcitation.com/cite), adding an English title in square brackets where your style asks.
6. Paste the finished list into [Verify references](https://edcitation.com/verify-references).

### The same query, with and without a language

On 3 October 2026 we searched "English as the language of science". With no filter, Find sources reported 2,125,574 results from OpenAlex. First came a 2001 volume edited by Ulrich Ammon, *The Dominance of English as a Language of Science*, shown with no author because the record names Ammon only as editor; Amano and colleagues' 2021 paper on non-English-language science in conservation came third.

With Language set to German, the count fell to 7,964: first a De Gruyter chapter on the place of English in science, its German and English titles run together; second, Axel Flessner's 2010 essay in *GAIA* against English's pre-eminence; fifth, Baethge's paper. Set to French, the search returned 18,320. The filter follows each record's language label, and labels can be wrong: Brown and Levinson's *Politeness*, a 1987 Cambridge University Press book in English, came fourth under German.

### Cite a source on one result

Baethge's DOI, 10.3238/arztebl.2008.0037, gave this APA 7 entry from Crossref's record, with no retraction found:

Baethge, C. (2008). The languages of medicine. *Deutsches Ärzteblatt International*, *105*(3), 37–40. https://doi.org/10.3238/arztebl.2008.0037

It stands as it is. Ammon's DOI, 10.1515/9783110869484, put "(Ed.)" in the right place and set the publisher, held in capitals in the record, as De Gruyter Mouton.

### Why Find sources is the tool for this job

Find sources is, in our view, the best place to start reading science beyond English: about 300 million published works, a language filter beside the year and source-type filters, no account, and every result a published record, as Baethge's paper in the German run shows. Find sources, Cite a source and Verify references are free. [References from a file](https://edcitation.com/tools/references-from-a-file), in Pro at $8 a month, checks every reference in an uploaded paper against its citations. The [Library](https://edcitation.com/tools/library) catalogue searches by language; reading or borrowing from more than 5 million books is part of Max at $24 a month. EdCitation finds, cites and checks; what you make of a German study is yours to write.

## Quick questions

### Why is English the language of science?

Twentieth-century events made it so: the 1919 to 1926 boycott of German science, two world wars and American research after 1945. By 2015, about 97% of papers in Web of Science's science index were in English (Liu, 2017).

### When did scientists stop writing in Latin?

Galileo turned to Italian around 1610 and Newton's *Opticks* appeared in English in 1704; after about 1830 important Latin works are hard to find. Botany required Latin for new plant names until 2011.

### Was German ever the main language of science?

It shared the lead with English and French. In 1879, 25% of Index Medicus journals were German against 35% English.

### What percentage of scientific papers are in English?

It depends on the database: about 97% of papers in Web of Science's science index in the decade to 2015, and 85.51% of Dimensions articles in 2023, by a preprint's count.

### Can EdCitation find scientific papers in German or French?

Yes. EdCitation's [Find sources](https://edcitation.com/) has a free Language filter with twelve languages, German and French among them.

## References

- Amano, T., Ramírez-Castañeda, V., Berdejo-Espinola, V., Borokini, I., Chowdhury, S., Golivets, M., González-Trujillo, J. D., Montaño-Centellas, F., Paudel, K., White, R. L., & Veríssimo, D. (2023). The manifold costs of being a non-native English speaker in science. *PLOS Biology*, *21*(7), Article e3002184. [https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002184](https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002184)
- Arenas-Castro, H., Berdejo-Espinola, V., Chowdhury, S., Rodríguez-Contreras, A., James, A. R. M., Raja, N. B., Dunne, E. M., Bertolino, S., Emidio, N. B., Derez, C. M., Drobniak, S. M., Fulton, G. R., Henao-Diaz, L. F., Kaur, A., Kim, C. J. S., Lagisz, M., Medina, I., Mikula, P., Narayan, V. P., . . . Amano, T. (2024). Academic publishing requires linguistically inclusive policies. *Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences*, *291*(2018), Article 20232840. [https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2023.2840](https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2023.2840)
- Baethge, C. (2008). The languages of medicine. *Deutsches Ärzteblatt International*, *105*(3), 37–40. [https://doi.org/10.3238/arztebl.2008.0037](https://doi.org/10.3238/arztebl.2008.0037)
- Cock, A. G. (1983). Chauvinism and internationalism in science: The International Research Council, 1919–1926. *Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London*, *37*(2), 249–288. [https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.1983.0013](https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.1983.0013)
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. (2023). *Proposal information*. [https://www.dfg.de/en/research-funding/proposal-funding-process/individual-grants-programmes/proposal-information](https://www.dfg.de/en/research-funding/proposal-funding-process/individual-grants-programmes/proposal-information)
- European Research Council. (2026). *ERC work programme 2026* (Annex to European Commission Decision C(2026) 62). European Commission. [https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/docs/2021-2027/horizon/wp-call/2026/wp_horizon-erc-2026_en.pdf](https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/docs/2021-2027/horizon/wp-call/2026/wp_horizon-erc-2026_en.pdf)
- Gillis, A. M. (2015). Impertinent questions with Michael D. Gordin. *Humanities*, *36*(6). National Endowment for the Humanities. [https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2015/novemberdecember/iq/impertinent-questions-michael-d-gordin](https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2015/novemberdecember/iq/impertinent-questions-michael-d-gordin)
- Hamel, R. E. (2007). The dominance of English in the international scientific periodical literature and the future of language use in science. *AILA Review*, *20*, 53–71. [https://doi.org/10.1075/aila.20.06ham](https://doi.org/10.1075/aila.20.06ham)
- Knapp, S., McNeill, J., & Turland, N. J. (2011). Changes to publication requirements made at the XVIII International Botanical Congress in Melbourne: What does e-publication mean for you? *BMC Evolutionary Biology*, *11*, Article 250. [https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2148-11-250](https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2148-11-250)
- Liu, W. (2017). The changing role of non-English papers in scholarly communication: Evidence from Web of Science's three journal citation indexes. *Learned Publishing*, *30*(2), 115–123. [https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1089](https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1089)
- Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923). [https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/262/390](https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/262/390)
- Pradier, C., Céspedes, L., & Larivière, V. (2025). *A smack of all neighbouring languages: How multilingual is scholarly communication?* [Preprint]. arXiv. [https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2504.21100](https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2504.21100)
- Ramírez-Castañeda, V. (2020). Disadvantages in preparing and publishing scientific papers caused by the dominance of the English language in science: The case of Colombian researchers in biological sciences. *PLOS ONE*, *15*(9), Article e0238372. [https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0238372](https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0238372)
- Reinbothe, R. (2013). Der Boykott gegen die deutschen Wissenschaftler und die deutsche Sprache nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg [The boycott against German scientists and the German language after World War I]. *DMW: Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift*, *138*(51–52), 2685–2690. [https://doi.org/10.1055/s-0033-1359937](https://doi.org/10.1055/s-0033-1359937)
- Swiss National Science Foundation. (2016). *General implementation regulations for the Funding Regulations*. [https://www.snf.ch/en/Zi65otScMDqzyALN/page/funding/documents-downloads/regulations-general-implementation-regulations](https://www.snf.ch/en/Zi65otScMDqzyALN/page/funding/documents-downloads/regulations-general-implementation-regulations)